`

Commissioned for the 2025 Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone In Ruins required 9 weeks of preparatory research, 31 days of walking and on-site research, and 8 months of drawing and further research between August 2024 – April 2025. The fabrication of two 4-panel maps measuring 4m x 1.9m was completed in late June, along with five 320mm square panels of smaller details.

From the exhibition catalogue:

Folkestone In Ruins is an act of irrational geography drawn from descriptions of Folkestone found in the historical record between 725–1925 AD, and from first-hand observations made over a period of one month. My initial plan was to first digest, in advance of a visit, every historical source I could find, beginning with the earliest known mention, and to then search the land, on foot, for everything I had seen described or depicted.

I spent months combing through the books and maps – both before and after my visit – gathering every curious description, vanished feature, disused placename and obsolete spelling into a database of around 1200 mappable things. Apart from one superb archaeological text, I studied no contemporary sources before travelling. When I arrived in Folkestone, my mental map of the place was expansive, exceedingly rich in colour and detail, and a couple of hundred years out of date.

What I’d found in the literature was a centuries-long succession of gentleman plagiarists, each one augmenting and pilfering from the work of the last. I decided to append myself to this lineage, borrowing freely and, as they had done, accepting as canon their obvious errors and fabrications. The leitmotif in all of this reading was a constant mourning for the glories of the past, the solemn fragments of which might only be glimpsed among the rubble of the obliterating present. Be it a Roman hypocaust or a postwar funfair, the rubble is always there to remind. Over May–June 2024 I spent 31 days walking the land and kicking through that detritus.

The result of all this is an upside-down archaeology, with the visible world effectively buried under the invisible. Precedence is generally given to the longer-ago, the more defunct, and the more meaningfully occulted. The present day is sometimes only seen in traces, in full opposition to the direction of time, and to the ravaging course of human settlement. Every inch of the work was a negotiation between conflicting timeframes. It is also littered with broken rules.

A map is generally expected to be correct in describing a place at one singular moment – it’s a slice of the past, along which we may at least assume the facts to have all been true at the same time. Folkestone in Ruins is a profusion of pasts. It is correct, too, in its way, it’s just not all correct at once.

The two large maps are installed at Folkestone Central train station and along the Harbour Arm, respectively, with a third site in planning for mid-2026. The five smaller panels are installed at various sites around town: the bottom of Tontine Street, Priory House at the top of Bayle Street, the FOCO building at the bottom of Black Bull Road, Martello Tower no. 3, and the mosque & community centre on Foord Road South, by the Bulldog Steps.

The Folkestone Triennial, running from 19 July – 19 October 2025, is the UK’s largest exhibition of newly commissioned public art. Many of its works remain as permanent features around Folkestone.

Dozens of people contributed to this project, but special thanks are due to Sorcha Carey and Jo Cowdrey, without whom it simply would not have happened, to project manager Simon Davenport, and to Creative Folkestone for devoting so much in time and resources to its success.

All content © 2025 J. Maizlish Mole. Website by Moneymouth.
This site is always under construction.